The Unified Style Guide (aka USG) is a side project I've been slowly piecing together over the past few years. It started mainly as an effort to document my personal preferences for structuring files and folders. A special file reserved in the style guide is the directory information file which simply provides a plain text description of the directory contents. When necessary, I have been using these files to describe the naming convention of the files contained within the parent directory.
I've been mulling over the idea of creating a utility to help with various items related to the USG such as style validation. One thought is to include a section in the directory info files which will provide the utility with file naming conventions. This would allow the utility to extract meta information from file names. For example, the following is one possible format of a directory info file:
= Example Directory
:date: 18 June 2016
This directory contains photos and text files with a short description about each photo.
.Naming Format
--------
Photo = <YYYYMMDD>-<Description>(-<Extra>).jpg
Notes = <YYYYMMDD>-<Description>(-<Extra>).txt
--------
Consider a directory with the following contents:
MyPhotos/
|-- 20160618-beach-sunset.jpg
|-- 20160618-beach-sunset.txt
|-- 20160617-forest.jpg
|-- 20160617-forest.txt
The JSON parsed from this directory might look like the following:
{"Photo":
[{"YYYYMMDD":"20160618","Description":"beach","Extra":"sunset","Extension":"jpg"},
{"YYYYMMDD":"20160617","Description":"forest","Extension":"jpg"}],
"Notes":
[{"YYYYMMDD":"20160618","Description":"beach","Extra":"sunset","Extension":"txt"},
{"YYYYMMDD":"20160617","Description":"forest","Extension":"txt"}]}
Now scripts could be written to use this meta information. The concept is still in the early phases and no code has been written yet but I have come across a few use cases for this type of functionality. Might make a good hack night project someday...
